Saturday, February 11, 2017

What he can't control, he attacks

With congressional
Republicans in the majority in Congress and unwilling to cross Donald Trump,
the job of containing Trump’s incipient tyranny falls to three centers of independent
power: the nation’s courts, its press, and a few state governments.

Which is why Trump is
escalating attacks on all three.

The judiciary

After federal Judge
James Robart – an appointee of George W. Bush – stayed Trump’s travel ban last
Friday, Trump leveled a personal attack on the judge.

“The opinion of this
so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country,
is ridiculous and will be overturned!” Trump tweeted Saturday morning.

This was followed by
another, late Sunday night: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country
in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system.”

For a President to
personally attack a federal judge who disagrees with him is a dangerous
overstepping of presidential power.

As Alexander Hamilton
famously wrote in the Federalist No. 78, the judiciary is the “least dangerous”
branch of government because it has “no influence over either the sword or the
purse.” It depends for its power and legitimacy on congress and the president.

Mike Pence tried to
defend Trump, saying “the president of the United States has every right to
criticize the other two branches of government. And we have a long tradition of
that in this country.”

Wrong. While other
presidents have publicly disagreed with court decisions, none before Trump has
gone after individual judges with personal invective.

None has tried to
intimidate individual judges.

None has questioned the legitimacy of the courts.

Trump is on the
warpath against Robart because he defied Trump.

The press

Speaking to the U.S.
Central Command on Monday, Trump veered off his prepared remarks to make a
remarkable claim: The media was intentionally covering up reports of terrorist
attacks.

“You’ve seen what
happened in Paris, and Nice,” Trump told the assembled military officers. “It’s
gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the
very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and
you understand that.”

Trump thereby elevated
his advisor Kellyanne Conway’s “Bowling Green massacre” justification for his
travel ban – a massacre that she claimed the press had failed to cover, but
which in fact never occurred – to a higher and vaster level of
conspiracy.

What could be the
press’s reason for covering up terrorist attacks, in Trump’s mind? What is it
that Trump assumed the military officers “understood?”

The only possible
inference is Trump believes that the press – like Judge Robart – seeks to
imperil our nation, because it doesn’t cow tow to Donald Trump.

The states

State governments pose
a third line of defense against Trump. Several state attorneys general have
taken Trump’s travel ban to court, and one particularly large Democratic state
– California – has defied him on immigration and the environment.

So Trump
is directed his ire against these states as well.

In a televised
interview Sunday, Trump threatened to take federal dollars away from
California. “We give tremendous amounts of money to California … California in
many ways is out of control …. We may have to [defund California]. Certainly
that would be a weapon,” he told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly,

A weapon for what?
What could Trump have been talking about?

The federal government doesn’t give
tremendous amounts of money to California, at least not net dollars. In fact,
Californians send more tax dollars to the federal government each year than the
state gets back from the federal government.

Fiscally, California
isn’t “out of control.” Since 2013, the state has operated with a budget
surplus. That’s more than can be said for the federal government. Or for
Trump’s own business, for that matter.

Trump’s real beef is
California is independent of him. It has defied Trump with its high
environmental standards and “sanctuary” cities.

Even worse, from his
standpoint, its citizens voted against him in the 2016 election by 2 to 1,
for a total of over 4 million votes. He can’t seem to get this out of his
mind.

Trump has repeatedly
suggested that millions of those votes were fraudulent. Last week, Trump
spokesman Sean Spicer identified California as one of the “bigger states” that
merit a federal probe into election fraud, adding, “That’s where I think we’re
gonna look.”

But Trump has no evidence
of voter fraud in California, or any other state for that matter.

For Trump, evidence is
irrelevant. California needs to be taught a lesson – just as do Judge Robart
and other members of the federal judiciary who defy him, just as do journalists
and media outlets that criticize him. And what is that lesson? That they dare
not cross Trump.

The judiciary, the
press, and California are major centers of resistance to Trump, because they
are independent of him. So he’s escalating his attacks on them.

Trump doesn’t want any
resistance. He wants total control.

ROBERT B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of
Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at
the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in
the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten
most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written
fourteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The
Work of Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent,
"Saving Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American
Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY
FOR ALL.

Thought for the day

“To be clear: For a candidate to say he is ‘waiting for God to speak’ viz election results is to say he is waiting for God to anoint him the rightful victor. It is to say that there is no world in which God would will for a Democrat to win.”